Maddalena Matera-Szczesniak is a 22-year old Toronto born student living in Montreal, Quebec. She grew up on a small rural island in the Bahamas, called Eleuthera and moved back to Canada to study.
She is a self taught mixed media artist. Her work is meant to capture human vulnerability, intimacy, and the somewhat quotidian events in human lives. Her goal as an artist is to create her world out of the tiniest of details, while attempting to visually communicate the larger emotions she experiences with the hope that they resonate with others.
“I became interested in art initially through a fascination with birds. I grew up on an island in the Bahamas, spent a lot of my time alone or outside with my siblings, and I’d paint birds, make frames out of driftwood and give them to neighbours or sell them at the local library. And this set the path for my life up to now, I’ve gone through so many phases artistically, I had a year dedicated to watercolour portraits, another dedicated to these animal/human hybrids I’d sketch out. And when I moved to Canada I started working in 9x9 landscape sketchbooks, I started collaging with mixed media, paintings I did, book excerpts I’d collect, items I’d find in the street even I just tried to capture everything I found important. All of the pages have jot notes that only I understand most of the time. And I sort of refer to them as visual documentations of who I was, who I am and who I am becoming. Every page is just a thought
Working small scale and intricately has helped me uncover the beauty that I believe is found in what we would normally consider the unremarkable moments in life. The banal, the everyday.” - Excerpt from “Young Artist and Speaker at the 2019 ‘Student Artists in Conversation’ at the AGO.”
I transitioned into tattooing in 2021, and have since watched my art evolve with that.